News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published 8:00 pm, Sunday, October 12, 2008

"You become closer to some patients and their families than others, but I can't think of one patient over the years I've been doing this who hasn't been special," said Klinger.

"I really love the field," she said. "I love the patients and the staff at the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse is the best. They all have dreams for the patients and work to make them come true."

Klinger is part of a shrinking field.

With the rapidly growing population of aging baby boomers and veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries and physical impairments, more occupational therapists are needed than ever before, she said.

Given the educational requirement of a master's degree for becoming an occupational therapist, the numbers graduating from college and completing required fieldwork training is not keeping up with the need for occupational therapists in the country.

Occupational therapists help patients improve their ability to perform tasks in their living and working environment. They work with individuals who suffer from a mentally, physically, developmentally, or emotionally disabling conditions.

The therapist helps patients not only to improve their basic motor functions and reasoning abilities, but also to compensate for permanent loss of function.

The goal is to help patients have independent, productive and satisfying lives.

"It's been very difficult to find occupational therapists," said Theresa Santoro, president and CEO of the RVNA. "The supply of trained OTs has not kept pace with the aging population growth."

Santoro said occupational therapists are "vital" to a home health care service like the Visiting Nurse Association. While the RVNA has been able to keep up with patient needs -- often by encouraging its occupational therapists like Klinger, 71, not to retire, Santoro said the RVNA is "definitely hiring."

"The specialty of home health care allows people to stay in their homes where they are most comfortable," Santoro said. "Occupational therapists sustain them, allowing them some independence in their lifestyle.

"Judy is an asset for our service. She's wonderful and has so much experience. She brings a great deal of care and experience to her clients."

Klinger has worked with patients from 3- to 100-years-old. She is still friends with one woman she trained in housekeeping therapy sessions at Rusk Institute at New York University when she first started working in the field.

"She was 8 when I started working with her," Klinger recalled. "She had been born without one leg and without arms. I taught her to cook and do housekeeping. She progressed wonderfully. She's an occupational therapist herself now."

When Klinger first came to the RVNA, she worked in hospice, caring for terminally ill patients. One patient was an 8-year-old boy and she remembers the first day she went to his house.

"He wasn't feeling well and was not too interested in meeting this woman who'd come to his house," Klinger recalled. "I started setting up a small tree structure and hanging pictures on it cut from a catalogue. 'What are you doing?' he asked. I told him I was making a wish tree where you hang the things you want to do on the tree."

The boy told Klinger he wanted to build a birdhouse and make a wooden train. They hung pictures of a birdhouse and of a train. He also said he wanted a teenager to come visit him.

Klinger went back to the RVNA and discussed this with the hospice team. She told her son, Gregg, then a teenager and an artist, about the boy's wish.

Gregg went to the boy's house and drew cartoons for him. He drew the boy as Superman and continued to send him cartoons that he drew, even though the boy was too ill for follow-up visits.

"That boy built the birdhouse," Klinger said. "And when he died and I went to his funeral, they said how he'd hung that birdhouse and how God had sent a sparrow to live in it. I was in tears."

Klinger has taught her patients crafts that help build their upper body strength.

She taught one patient to weave. When the woman wove eight squares while Klinger was on vacation one summer, the therapist came back and turned the squares into a pillow.

Klinger saw that another patient got a microwave oven so she wouldn't have to use a stove to cook her meals. The woman was older and forgetful and would leave stove burners on.

Another patient had had a stroke and wasn't aware of the left side of her body's functioning. Klinger helped her re-learn how to do the preparation of food for meals, which the woman's husband then cooked. She saw that they got a microwave, too.

Klinger now is semi-retired. Normally, she sees patients two to three times a week.

Sometimes, as when a patient has Lou Gehrig's disease, the viists will be five times a week. Lou Gehrig's disease causes a wasting away of the muscle tissue and these patients -- of whom she's worked with 11 over the years -- have decreasing strength. She works to help "keep them going."

Employment of occupational therapists is expected to increase 23 percent by 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor Web site states. Demand for occupational therapists should continue to rise.

Besides the conditions already mentioned that are increasing the need for occupational therapists, medical advances now enable more patients with critical problems to survive, and these patients require extensive therapy, the Web site said.

Occupational therapists must be licensed, requiring a master's degree in occupational therapy, six months of supervised field work and passing scores on national and state examinations. More than a quarter of occupational therapists work part time.